Anwar al-Awlaki: The Next Bin Laden

With Osama dead, U.S. intelligence is zeroing in on the remaining most dangerous terrorists alive, and one man is at the top of the list. Of the eighteen terror attacks attempted in the United States over the past two years, Anwar al-Awlaki's fingerprints are on eight of them. The moderate turned radical is eloquent, he is popular— and he's American. Patrick Symmes travels to Awlaki's new base, the wilds of Yemen, to search for public enemy number one

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It was the first drone attack in Yemen in a decade. On May 5, three days after Osama bin Laden was killed, a weaponized unmanned aircraft flew at 20,000 feet over the cracked and broken topography of Yemen. The target was a pickup truck carrying two men, one of them an American-born cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki.

U.S. intelligence had been tracking him for years. Last July, Awlaki had been seen in Shabwa Province, a restive Al Qaeda stronghold in southern Yemen, where he was said to have recruited hundreds of young loyalists. This May the Yemeni government tipped off U.S. forces that Awlaki was there again, hiding in the village of Abdan. About seventy-five American Special Forces are in Yemen, supposedly on a training mission. When a pickup truck carrying the cleric left Abdan, the drone controlled by either the CIA or Joint Special Operations Command followed. Somebody took a shot at Awlaki.

And another shot. And another shot.

Incredible luck? Expert off-road driving? However it happened, Awlaki survived the first, the second, and the third drone strikes. All three missiles missed. The pickup truck was said to be "lightly damaged," according to a village source, and Awlaki was unharmed.

By now he could be anywhere—a shepherd's hut outside Mar'ib, the Al Qaeda capital of Yemen; a comfy pad outside cities like Aden or Taiz; or as a senior Western diplomat in Sanaa suggested, hiding among his ancestral clan members, the Awlakis, a powerful tribe that has ruled parts of southern Yemen for generations.

Wherever he is, Awlaki is only hiding physically. Unlike Bin Laden, who limited himself to the occasional thumb drive, Awlaki has spent the last two years going online routinely, firing off e-mails and posting web videos. His sermons, given in beautiful idiomatic English, are sold in sixteen- and eighteen-part CD collections, with sweet-sounding themes like Islamic motherhood or "Tolerance—A Hallmark of Muslim Character," but he reaches quickly for the big stick. "Allah will take those false gods," he says of non-Muslims, in a sermon ostensibly about police brutality, "and throw them in hellfire, and their people will have to follow them."

"In the West, Bin Laden's preaching is not effective," says Saeed Ali al-Jemhi, a kind of one-man anti–Al Qaeda think tank whom I met with in Yemen in March, when Bin Laden was still alive. "But Awlaki, they listen to him once or twice, they are in. He's the radical magnet. He gave Al Qaeda a fifty-year push forward, an evolution."

Awlaki ran a blog until that was shut down, flooded YouTube until that was shut down, and spews e-mails, audio files, and videos to a constantly changing array of sympathetic websites. It took me about ten minutes to find all the sermons that were banned from YouTube. Despite a lot of Islamic jargon, you can hear his emotional appeal as he raps in English about repression ("Five hundred and twenty-eight Muslims were arrested under these new laws!") and the supreme courage it takes to become God's armed defender. In a how-to guide titled "44 Ways to Support Jihad," he says, "Jihad today is obligatory on every capable Muslim. So as a Muslim who wants to please Allah it is your duty to find ways to practice it and support it." In the midst of hiding from American drones, he still found time to write for Inspire, the snappy English-language magazine of Al Qaeda, a manual for waging jihad. (Inspire strikes a bizarrely knowing, ironic tone, advising potential contributors, "Humor is a plus!")

"He is Al Qaeda's voice to Muslims in the West," says Gregory Johnsen of Princeton, who lived in Yemen and studies Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). "Al Qaeda was passive in recruiting Westerners, waiting for them to come. Awlaki is very different. He is quite active going after these Westerners."

Active enough to inspire at least eight of the past eighteen reported terror plots on American soil and land himself on the CIA's list of targets for killing—one of roughly thirty people subject to long-range assassination by the U.S. government. His most obvious success was the alleged Fort Hood assassin, Major Nidal Hasan, an army doctor charged with killing a dozen soldiers and a civilian during a shooting rampage in November of 2009. Major Hasan and Awlaki exchanged at least eighteen e-mails, almost all from Hasan to Awlaki, listing supposed Sharia justifications for why one could kill U.S. soldiers. Awlaki sent him two or three e-mails, by his own account, encouraging martyrdom. Signing off, Hasan wrote, "I can't wait to join you" in paradise.

A less lethal example came six months later in England, where a would-be killer named Roshonara Choudhry, 22, stabbed a member of Parliament in the stomach twice, after listening to a hundred hours of sermons by Awlaki. The cleric advised another recruit, "Our highest priority is the U.S." The recipient, a 31-year-old volunteer named Rajib Karim, was an IT expert at British Airways who offered to exploit his position to blow up a plane. "The question is," Awlaki wrote, "with the people you have is it possible to get a package or a person with a package on board a flight heading to the US? Anything there, even on a smaller scale compared to what we might do in the UK, would be our choice."

After Bin Laden's death, warns former FBI agent Ali Soufan, Al Qaeda will reshu±e. "Al Qaeda claims to be a religious organization," he notes, "but they don't have a known cleric. In the absence of Bin Laden, there is this guy who is Yemeni, who can unify the Arabian Peninsula factions, and who is also a cleric who speaks English well. He has a big potential to be the person who might try to fill Bin Laden's shoes."